Building my first app: cheap eats in Japan
1000Yen Eats maps every place in Japan where a real meal costs under ¥1,000: ramen counters, gyudon chains, conbini. It was my first app ever, built to answer one question: can I take an app all the way from an idea to the App Store on my own? It turned out to be useful too.
- ROLE
- Everything: product, data, design, store launches. Code with Claude Code.
- SINCE
- March 2026
- STACK
- Claude Code, Expo / React Native, Supabase + PostGIS, Mapbox, OpenStreetMap
- STATUS
- Live on iOS and Android
Restaurants: the app’s database. Review time: App Store Connect. Downloads: App Store Connect + Google Play, updated twice a day.
01 WHY
Two months in Japan, and a question
I spent two months in Japan and ate very well for very little: a bowl of ramen, a set meal, a conbini dinner, all under ¥1,000. So when I wanted to find out whether I could build and ship a real app by myself, that was the obvious subject.
The data comes from OpenStreetMap, matched against the chains and kinds of places that stay under the ceiling, and refreshed every week by a script on my Mac mini.
02 THE APP
A map, a list, and it works offline
Open it, and you see what is cheap around you: filter by ramen, sushi, gyudon or conbini, see what is open now, save places for later. Whole cities can be downloaded, because a tourist on a train in Japan doesn’t always have signal. Accounts came later; at first it worked without signing up for anything.
03 SHIPPING IT
The App Store was the easy part
I submitted the first version on the evening of 19 May. Apple approved it in under 24 hours and it went live on the 20th. The slow part was everything around it: the EU wants a trader registration before an app can be sold there, which took until June, and Google Play wanted its privacy policy reworded before an update.
On 16 June I launched it on Product Hunt myself, iOS only, with the honest angle: a personal experiment in building a real app and taking it all the way through publishing. Product Hunt picked it for its daily newsletter that day. Android followed in June, then accounts and a meal log in July.
04 WHAT IT TAUGHT ME
The first app made the next ones possible
Everything I learned here, store reviews, signing, push, offline data, privacy forms, went straight into the next apps: the F1 calendar went from a website to both stores in nine days, and BiałkoRadar in a month. 1000Yen Eats stays live as what it was meant to be: a small, useful map for people travelling in Japan on a budget.
05 TRY IT